How to Make a Homemade Tick Spray for Your Yard

Worried about ticks in your yard? There are ways to get rid of them, and this doesn’t have to include dangerous chemicals. One of the best things you can do to combat ticks on your property is good yard maintenance. This includes mowing, removing leaf clutter, and raking up smaller vegetation. You can also use a homemade tick spray for your yard. Keep scrolling to find some great DIY recipes for homemade tick spray that you can use on your property, as well as some commercially available natural products you can use if you don’t want to make your own.

There are several DIY recipes for making your own all-natural tick spray, such as mixing water and certain essential oils that naturally repel these common pests. I’ll get into all the details and full recipes here.

I’ll also talk about my favorite natural products that you can purchase and use to prevent ticks in your yard. They’re great if you’d rather just have a done-for-you solution that is still safe and healthy.

Let’s start with some basic information about ticks.

LawnChick.com is reader supported. If you make a purchase after clicking a link, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Ticks and Why You Should Worry About Them

Ticks can carry a variety of harmful diseases, so you should take steps to reduce their presence in your yard. They’re small arachnids that attach themselves to an animal or human host, then feed on blood for survival and reproduction.

Not all ticks carry disease, but many species can carry diseases such as Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Ticks often lurk in trees, shrubs, and tall grasses, so it’s important to be aware of their existence if you spend time outdoors or have pets that do.

As ticks are difficult to spot until they’ve already consumed a significant amount of blood, keeping them at bay is the best way to protect yourself, your family, and your pets.

Noticing an infestation can be quite difficult, but there are signs that you can look out for.

How Ticks Can Affect Your Pets

Pets are especially vulnerable to picking up ticks because they are closer to the ground and roll around in the grass. If your dog or cat ends up with ticks, they’ll be in discomfort and the problem may affect their health.

As I already touched on earlier, ticks consume blood. That means that when they latch onto your pet, they drink its blood. Dogs can get Lyme Disease, just like people.

How to Determine If You Have a Tick Problem in Your Yard

As ticks are so easy to miss, it’s important to check yourself and your pets for ticks after spending time outdoors.

In our house we do tick checks whenever we take a walk in the woods, stripping off our clothing and laundering it promptly, while quickly scanning for ticks on our skin. It generally will take hours for a tick to latch on and embed itself, so prompt checks after outdoor time will often allow you to remove any ticks before they latch on.

If you ever notice ticks on you after being outdoors in your own yard, there’s a chance that you have a tick infestation.

Ticks thrive in moist, warm climates, so if your yard is consistently damp and humid, you may be more at risk.

One of the easiest ways of checking for ticks is to drag a piece of white fabric (like a bedsheet) across various spots in your yard. Make sure that it’s a type of fabric that ticks can grab and hold onto.

It’s best to use an old towel or something you don’t mind getting dirty. This is how many tick researchers find and monitor tick density in forests and fields.

If you find ticks on the fabric, you probably have a tick infestation.

Benefits of Using a Homemade Tick Spray

A homemade tick spray is an easy and cost-effective way to reduce the tick population in your yard. It’s a great option if you want to avoid using chemicals that could be potentially hazardous for your family and the environment.

The ingredients you use to make homemade tick spray should be all natural. Examples include vinegar, essential oils, and other products such as garlic.

It’s also much cheaper to make homemade tick spray than to buy a commercial product. Depending on your yard’s size, this could lead to significant savings.

What Ingredients Do You Need To Make A Homemade Tick Spray?

Homemade tick sprays are often made from a combination of water (to disperse the spray better) and natural oil that repels ticks.

There are a few popular oils to choose from, the most common being:

• Cedar Oil: Cedar oil is a very bitter substance that has a strong smell and is known to repel many different species of insects.
• Lemongrass Oil: Lemongrass oil has a pleasant citrusy aroma and is often used as an essential oil for aromatherapy. It also has insect-repelling properties, as well as being safe for humans and animals.
• Lavender Oil: Lavender has a very calming scent that is popular in many different products due to its pleasant aroma. In addition, it’s known to repel various insects, such as flies and moths.
• Eucalyptus Oil: Eucalyptus has a strong scent that can repel ticks and other insects. It’s also known to have antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral properties, which makes it a great choice for making homemade tick sprays.

Any of these ingredients used in combination with water can be quite effective in reducing the tick population in your yard.

How To Make A Homemade Tick Spray For Your Yard

Making your own spray is an easy process. You can just add one or more of the above oils to water. You can also add other ingredients, such as dish soap and garlic.

Homemade Tick Spray Recipe

If you’re making smaller batches, here’s a great recipe for homemade tick spray:

• 8 drops of cedar oil
• 1 cup of water
• 1 drop of liquid soap used for washing dishes

Put this mixture into a spray bottle and apply it all around your yard. You should focus on your property’s perimeter especially.

With this natural remedy, you can’t just apply it once and think the job is done. You have to keep re-applying. I’d recommend doing it once a week or once every two weeks at the very least, and you may want to scale up the recipe and use a pump sprayer like this one on Amazon or even a backpack sprayer for easier application (depending upon the size of your property.

Things to Keep In Mind

If you’re adding dish soap, make sure you don’t go overboard. Too high of a concentration of soap can damage your grass and other plants.

You should try spraying your mixture on small areas of your lawn first, to make sure it doesn’t cause any damage. After that, you can apply it to the rest of your lawn and garden space.

Make sure to cover areas where ticks could be hiding, such as tall grass, wood piles, leaf litter, or other vegetation that provide shelter. I like to go around the entire perimeter of my backyard, where my family and I spend most of our time outdoors, repeating this weekly for a few weeks to create a lasting barrier.

You’ll have to reapply your homemade tick spray after heavy rains or if you notice an increase in tick activity. I recommend re-applying every 3 weeks at a minimum.

Tips for Preventing a Tick Problem in Your Yard

Ticks cannot jump the same way as fleas. Instead, they rely quite heavily on foliage to transfer to their hosts.

That’s why you should reduce the amount of vegetation that ticks can hide in on your property. This is especially important in areas where your family and pets spends a lot of time.

By mowing grass regularly to the correct height, pruning hedges and shrubs, and clearing away brush or leaves you can reduce the habitat ticks prefer.

More generally – keeping your yard well-maintained will make your property much less desirable for ticks to set up shop.

Plants in your garden that overhang your outdoor areas can also be a draw for ticks, so make sure to keep these pruned back and away from your patio or balcony.

It’s also a good idea to avoid piling up firewood, logs, or other items that provide shelter for ticks around the edge of your yard.

Additionally, if you have pets, you should understand that if they’re allowed to wander freely in areas where ticks may be present, they’ll probably bring some home with them.

There are quite a few birds, and other animals which eat ticks, so giving those types of animals the best chance at spotting ticks in your yard is a good idea.

This includes maintaining bird baths and feeders, as well as allowing logs to remain in places where birds can easily access them. But remember that the logs can also end up being a place where ticks can hide, so keep a balance with this.

Regular Lawn Care Can Help Prevent Tick Infestations in Your Yard

Just doing regular lawn care, such as mowing your lawn and clearing up debris (including dead leaves) goes a long way in cutting down on your risk of tick infestation.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends regular lawn care as well as keeping your lawn tidy. It’s a good idea to also put up fences so that animals that may carry ticks (such as raccoons) won’t come onto your property.

Remember, you always want to prevent there being places for ticks to hide. You don’t want to let your grass grow too high, as long grass is a hiding place for ticks.

Commercial and Professional Tick Removal Options

If you’re not eager to make your own tick repellent or think your yard needs something stronger, you can buy and use a pre-made tick repellent.

But just because you’re getting a commercial product doesn’t mean it has to be chemical. For a non-synthetic approach with plant-based ingredients, I’d go with Nix Ticks from Sunday Lawn Care, or Yard Patrol from Lawnbright. I’ve used both and was impressed.

You connect the Nix Ticks or Yard Patrol spray directly to your garden hose, and use this to spray the solution in the perfect ratio. It kills ticks on contact. The spray lasts up to 4 weeks after application, and one 32 oz bottle covers up to 5,000 square feet (Sunday’s product) or 4,000 square feet (Lawnbright’s), which will handle most yards.

You can measure your yard’s square footage accurately here to figure out exactly how much to order.

These products utilize concentrated cedar oil, which is one of the safest and most effective ways to remove ticks from your lawn. It’s also environment-friendly and won’t harm your pets or the local wildlife.

While Lawnbright and Sunday are both some of the best subscription lawn care services, you can also buy their products individually – either to supplement your annual subscription with these companies, or to work alongside whatever brand you prefer to use to fertilize your lawn.

Wrapping Things Up: Homemade Tick Spray for Yard

As I’ve shown here, it’s simple and easy to make a homemade tick spray for your yard. However, you shouldn’t expect it to be as effective as a commercial-made product (such as the Sunday tick spray I recommended).

As well as ticks, do you have an ant problem on your lawn? Check out my guide to how to get rid of ants naturally.